The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s top official announced Wednesday the agency will start the process of changing a decade-old rule with the hopes of increasing prescribed burns.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, appointed earlier this year by President Donald Trump, said he has asked staff to specifically revisit the agency’s Exceptional Events Rule, which Zeldin claims has partially stood in the way of communities increasing their prescribed burning efforts.
The rule has long held prescribed burning in a gray area. The policy allows states to be exempt from meeting national air quality standards during “exceptional events,” or times of high pollution readings that states can’t control, like wildfires. However, a study published in February said prescribed fires may not always meet the exemption.
Since the practice is human-caused, is likely to recur, and is preventable, the current EPA policy would disqualify them as “exceptional events” and may lead to federal violations and financial penalties for states, according to the researchers. For this reason, EPA staff said that prescribed burns are virtually never nominated for exclusion under the rule.
“The relevant parts of the rule are very complex, but, to simplify, they indicate that if a prescribed burn complies with certain regulations and standard practices, it will be deemed by the agency to be “not reasonably controllable or preventable” and classified as a “natural” rather than “human-caused” event, such that the “unlikely to recur” requirement no longer applies,” the study said. To qualify, prescribed burns must comply with smoke management plans that reduce pollution effects and multiyear land resource management plans that set the frequency and location of burns. These requirements are quite complex and potentially burdensome.”
Zeldin affirmed that prescribed fires are necessary to protect communities from future catastrophic wildfires, but it’s unclear what changes he could make to the rule in order to increase prescribed burn activity. The EPA could have outright excluded as prescribed fires from the Exceptional Event Rule, but doing so may have incentivized states to avoid such burns and, instead, risk wildfires that are already exempt, the researchers said.
“As air quality standards are tightened, and as efforts are made to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire on the landscape, it is possible that emissions from prescribed fires could have increased implications for nonattainment status,” the study said. “Indeed, the recent rulemaking process that lowered the annual PM2.5 standard raised significant concern within the forest management community over potential constraints the revised standard might impose on use of prescribed fire.”
After the National Fire Plan was put into effect in 2001, with one goal being the increased use of prescribed fire, the California Air Resources Board issued what was known as Title 17 to limit the anticipated increase in use of prescribed fire. Remarkably, it also limited the use of natural fires allowed to burn, such as in wilderness, by using an interesting logic that, although such fires are random in timing and location, the fact that managers chose to allow them to burn made them just like prescribed fires, and therefore subject to, among other issues, the collection of burn fees. Meanwhile, wildfire risk didn’t get mitigated through prescribed fire and so wildfires produced many times more smoke than prescribed or natural fires, but got a pass because they were an “exceptional event.” No amount of arguing with air quality regulators helped, since they would not consider that prescribed fire would reduce emissions from future wildfires. Any relief from the EPA to facilitate the use of prescribed fire would be not only welcome, but also long overdue.
I’m sorry, but that’s not how exceptional events work.
Yes, that was the problem; wildland prescribed fire emissions affected the county emissions inventory as regulators struggled to meet attainment objectives. Consequently, prescribed fire permits were tightly controlled, especially if ag burning was competing for the same airshed. Wildfire emissions were of less concern although ample science demonstrated that management actions such as fire suppression or the lack of a significant fuels program were a root cause of enormous quantities of wildfire smoke, often sufficient to send people to the hospital. With regard to the definition of exceptional events, wildfires are really neither “unusual,” especially as climate change heats things up more each year, nor “natural” when viewed through the lens of fuels projects not done which would have mitigated wildfire emissions, as well as fire suppression activities which contribute to a buildup of wildland fuel quantity and continuity available to wildfires, which are management decisions.
I work on exceptional events for prescribed burns and wildfires. The only difference I see with prescribed burn and wildfire exceptional events is the requirement of a SMP for prescribed burns. I am the only one in my Region reviewing the exceptional events. I’m currently reviewing 11 exceptional events and with all the rumors of RIFs all I can think about is…What happens if I’m fired?
Prevent “mega-fires” with fuel management programs and the prescribed burn program is a net gain.
However, as with all “prevention” and safety programs, you can’t prove a negative so we become penny wise and pound foolish with regulations.